The Restaurateur Who Helped Build an Empire—and Gave It All Up

Welcome to Out of the Kitchen, our ongoing exploration of the people and relationships that built and sustain Andrew Tarlow’s Brooklyn restaurant mini-empire.
A restaurant, and a restaurant group, is more than just the sum of its recent reviews, or its current set of chefs and servers. Like a child, or a neighborhood, it’s as much a product of its creators, its DNA, the nature side of the equation, as it is the scrum of customers, the changing neighborhood, the nurture of everyday business.
If you were to map the genome of Diner and Marlow & Sons, the two restaurants that started what we’re now calling the Tarlow group, you’d find three dominant strands of influence. There’s Andrew Tarlow, of course, the current owner and co-founder, who’s turned two small restaurants into an empire across Brooklyn. Then there’s Caroline Fidanza, the chef who was hired last-minute but brought a simple, locavore approach to cooking that became the restaurants’ signature style (and soon spread to the rest of Brooklyn).
And then there’s Mark Firth. The Marlow in Marlow & Sons is a combination of the Mar from Mark and the Low from Tarlow, a mashup that gives a good idea of how closely the two co-founders worked together to create the earlier restaurants. By all accounts, Firth is the natural-born bon vivant of the pair, the welcoming friend at the Diner door, the natural leader of all-night parties after closing time. In the words of Fidanza, “Andrew’s the kind of guy where, if he’s working in the restaurant and it ends up late and he ends up hanging out with the staff, that’s cool. But Mark’s a pro schmoozer. He would go out.”

Firth and Tarlow started out as coworkers at Keith McNally‘s Tribeca restaurant Odeon, but quickly became buddies, and then roommates, after they both went through respective breakups. Diner, or something like Diner, a restaurant of their own, was something they talked about from early on, bouncing ideas off of each other. When it finally opened, in 1998, they were happy to discover that their contrasting personalities—Mark the globetrotting extrovert (his lifelong dream had been to open a bar), Andrew the perfectionist painter—somehow complemented each other, even when running a restaurant.
Sean Rembold, the executive chef at Reynard, described Firth and Tarlow as the “perfect counterbalances” to each other. Having two co-owners, equally engaged in the day-to-day running of the restaurants, meant that every conversation had at least three voices, and decisions would quickly lean towards a majority. Ken Reynolds, the guy who built all the restaurants, said that “when Mark and Andrew were walking towards you, you knew one was the good cop, one was the bad cop, but you never knew which.” They split responsibility evenly, but ended up playing to their strengths: Firth out front, where, according to Rembold, “he had the ability to make every single person in a crazy chaotic space feel like they were the most important person there,” and Tarlow leaning more on the considerable logistics of something like renting refrigerated trucks to pick up produce in Pennsylvania, or setting up a butcher shack out back. It was restaurant yin and yang, in action.
But you might have noticed the past tense. Starting part-time in 2009, and permanently in the following years, Firth packed up his family and moved to Great Barrington, Massachusetts.
“I just needed space,” Firth told me over the phone, by way of explaining the move. “When I moved to Brooklyn, there was a lot of open sky. We had a Williamsburg golf club where you could go and hit balls into the water. Now that’s The Edge, those condos.”
The changing neighborhood aside, the move upstate was also a natural extension of the interest in serving purely local, organic food that was going on at Diner and Marlow & Sons. In a 2003 interview with the Brooklyn Rail, Firth and Tarlow told a reporter they would have their own farm upstate supplying their restaurants by the next year, with further plans for their own vineyards, free-range livestock, and dairy farms. Those ag ambitions hadn’t materialized by 2008, but a free-range, grass-fed butcher store, Marlow & Daughters, had, and Firth’s yen for the country life had intensified.
“It was a little idealistic,” Firth told me. “I thought I would just farm and sell my pigs and sheep back to my friends with restaurants in Brooklyn.” He bought an 82-acre farm in the Berkshires, and what started as a vacation house, with Firth commuting between Great Barrington and Brooklyn every few days, soon turned into home. Tarlow bought him out of their shared businesses, and Firth set out as a small farmer.

Inside The Prairie Whale

More than just a change of pace, Firth wanted a sense of real ownership, and putting down roots. He had grown up in Zambia to English parents, and moved to Brooklyn after a stint living and working at a bar in Florence (“I was trying to get here for the World Cup, but missed it by a few months”). And in the back of his head, the whole time he was in Brooklyn, was the fact that his brother bought a house for himself in the north of England when he was 18 years old. “A tough thing about New York and Brooklyn is that you can’t get your roots in,” he said. “It’s nice to be in a place where you can work, get a decent wage, and own your own house.”
After some time trying his hand at farming, though, Firth found himself drawn back to the world of restaurants (“I love to sit and drink wine and eat—I love the restaurant business”). So he opened Prairie Whale, named after a 19th-century term for pigs, so-called after an inventor figured out how to use lard as a substitute in lamps for whale oil.
“It’s so much like Brooklyn that it’s ridiculous,” Firth said, describing the “crazy customer base” he has, and the sense of local community (even if it’s a little leafier than in NYC). The head chef at Prairie Whale, Stephen Browning, is a Diner and Marlow alum who found the commute to Great Barrington from his home in upstate New York a lot easier than schlepping down to Brooklyn every day, and pastry chef Megan McDiarmid spent time there, too.
With Prairie Whale, Firth didn’t set out to make a radical break with the restaurants he created with Tarlow, and the food he served with Fidanza. “Steve might add some different combinations than Caroline or Sean [Rembold, head chef at Reynard] would, but it’s the same formula,” Firth said, “fresh, good for you, and sustainable.”
When he visits Brooklyn, Firth eats at Diner and Marlow (“I stayed at the Wythe last week, actually”), and he sometimes misses the old neighborhood, and his old friends. But “everyone’s always going backwards and forwards,” he said, estimating that 75 percent of the people who work at Diner and Marlow have come up to visit him at Prairie Whale. “And I know then and know now that leaving was the best decision I’ve made, apart from opening Diner in the first place.”